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* * *
Hsin. Wake up. It is time to go to work.
Work? Watching paper dissolve to dirt? Watching spectacles rust? The coal is gone; there is nothing to dredge up. Why don’t we go down to the east wall and watch the tide strangle the shore?
Hsin. If you do not get up you will be punished. You are assigned to the sea-shaft today—that’s twelve bridges across the roofs and all those stairs, all those stairs down to the mine mouth. And there is rain.
Xiao, pretty sparrow-wife, who will punish me? The foremen are gone, everything is gone, there are only the quiet termites boring through banisters, and they do not care if we are tardy.
Please, please wake up. I am tired too, my bones are full of black too, my spine wavers in me like a flapping flag, but I am ready, I am going to my assignment. We must make the best of it.
No. I won’t go back there, not there.
* * *
The air disturbs needle-leaved weeds—there is green on Gunkanjima, now. It is a corpse; corpses are always gardens. Caterpillars wriggle in its gutters; out of its stone lips sprout loud mustaches of greenery—the air moves its hand over them and sees nothing, sees only the splintered staircases winding down past their own shadows. Somewhere down there is the entrance to the long, dripping jaw—a shaft sunk deep below the sea, a shaft that vomited up black sludge and bile and bodies.
The air does not want to go down into it.
It never dug those ant tracks through the basalt, but Chen and Zhao did, Chen and Zhao who met washing the soot from their faces, Chen and Zhao who told endless jokes about the carpenter and his angry hammer when all the candles had guttered, who filled their floor with muffled laughter. Chen and Zhao—and Hsin, who was never late, and whose breath smelled of sour plums. They all came back to the towers, towers bristling the island like a brush, they all came back with damp shoulders, damp from that cool, wet tunnel where their palms turned black.
The air does not want to go down. Old voices come up through broken stairs like ferns; ferns throw roots down through broken stairs like voices—the air sits down heavily and puts its head in its hands.
* * *
Hsin, it’s dark. The wind—
Tastes like metal, yes. It’s always dark in the lower levels—the towers eat the sun. Come back up, you don’t want to be down there, down with the algae and the old rain and the rusted pipes.
It’s dark, dark like the inside of a bone. Why do I wake up here, Hsin, with a drainage grate for my pillo
w? The bars, the bars in my flesh—
Because you fell, Xiao. You wake up there because you fell.
I fell?
You wake up down there and then you come running to me to wake me up for a shift I worked sixty years ago. You don’t see the puddle I sleep in every night, the seawater that falls out of my mouth whenever I speak, the coal-phlegm that coats my hair. You never see it, not since the sea came in, but it’s all right, it’s all right—
The sea came in—
The sea came in, my love, the sea came in through a crack in the shaft ceiling—I saw it open like a womb releasing its water. I stared at it; I could not move—
The sea came in and I fell—
The sea came in and Zhao put his arms over my head but my mouth was full of salt, full of salt, and Zhao floated up in the rush, in the foam, he floated in the foam and I could see his blue shirt tear on the rocks—
Yes. And the Kims’ cricket sat on the tatami, waiting for its supper. It waited and I fell, it waited and I fell and it sang as I fell and its song stopped when the grate broke me in pieces—
The sea came in and my mouth was full of salt but at least I was clean, I was clean in the dark and the helmet lights went out one by one and it was so dark down there in the mine mouth and the water—
tasted like metal.
tasted like metal.
And I fell, I fell from the bridge-labyrinth, I put my feet onto the boards, onto the slats, and I balanced there like a circus girl, arms out, arms out, and I could hear the sea sucking through the shaft, a hole in the sea where the shaft was, and I remembered Zhao’s blue shirt and the carpenter with his hammer, I remembered your plums and the prickle of your mustache on my lips, I remembered how your cheeks tasted always of coal, and I fell, I fell so far, through all those bridges and ropes and stairs, I fell and the cricket sang and the drainage grate came thudding through me—
Xiao, Xiao, hush, it’s all right, you don’t have to remember it. No good comes of remembering it.
